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Hot off the press - 3D ice-cream: New in tech this week

(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) It's hot. You want ice-cream. But not any old ice-cream cone - you want it in the image of your face. Students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made an ice-cream 3D printer that forces out Mr Whippy-style soft ice cream into any given shape then freezes it with a blast of liquid nitrogen.

Amazon's gone all-you-can-eat for books. The new Kindle Unlimited service offers access to more than 600,000 books for $9.99 a month (pounds 5.85) through any Kindle device or the Kindle app on a smartphone or tablet. Launched in the US this week, it's expected to be rolled out in the UK in the near future.

"Bzzzt, eyes on the road!" shouts the car seat, enabled with sleep-detecting technology thanks to Nottingham Trent University. Researchers are working on seats that can monitor a driver's alertness by measuring their heartbeat with sensors. Warnings to pull over would be triggered first, with cruise control and lane-guidance systems engaged if the driver ignores them to bring the vehicle safely to a halt.

A slice of new Raspberry Pi? The tiny British computer got an upgrade this week, making it smaller, using less power and easier to fit into DIY projects. The Raspberry Pi model B+ is the size of a credit card and costs pounds 20.

The future of flight is electric. Airbus's E-Fan 2.0 is electric, flies for an hour and can carry two people silently through the air. Samuel Gibbs
(c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited.